Antonio Arnaiz-Villena
Encyclopedia
Antonio Arnaiz-Villena is a Spanish
immunologist
noted for his research into the genetic history of ethnic groups and fringe linguistic hypotheses. Arnaiz-Villena was president of Spain's National Society of Immunology from 1991 to 1995. He has written more than 300 papers in immunology and human and bird population genetics. He is Head of the Department of Microbiology I (Immunology) at the Complutense University of Madrid
and at Hospital 12 de Octubre http://www.madrid.org/cs/Satellite?blobcol=urlordenpdf&blobheader=application%2Fpdf&blobkey=id&blobtable=CM_Orden_BOCM&blobwhere=1142567931852&ssbinary=true, pages 15 and 18.
He has been invited to give lectures in The French Academy of Sciences (College de France) http://www.college-de-france.fr/default/EN/all/col_daus/Journees_Jean_Dausset_8_et___5.htm and The Royal Society (London)http://royalsociety.org/events/human-evolution-satellite-meeting-biographies/
and Palestinians, which he co-authored in the journal Human Immunology
in 2001. http://kinoko.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~duraid/stolen_science/The_Origin_of_Palestinians_and_Their_Genetic_Relatedness_With_Other_Mediterranean_Populations.pdf
This became controversial because of its assertions about the origins of the Palestine-Israeli conflict. Following strong criticism, it was withdrawn from the journal and deleted from the scientific archive. Also, academics who had already received a copy of the journal were urged to "physically remove" the article pages in a move that had no precedent in research publishing. The comments about Arab-Israeli conflicts were described as "extreme political writing", which included claims that Palestinians in Syria and Lebanon lived in "concentration camps". Arnaiz-Villena was removed from the journal's editorial board.
The decision was met with opposition from several academics. Andrew Goffey, a Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University
, England, observing that "it was conceded that the article had not been removed on the basis of its scientific evidence," failed to find anything offensive in the paper. Several scientists wrote to the publishers to support Arnaiz-Villena and to protest their heavy-handedness. One of them said: "If Arnaiz-Villena had found evidence that Jewish people were genetically very special, instead of ordinary, you can be sure no one would have objected to the phrases he used in his article. This is a very sad business."
" debate and became embroiled in disputes between Greek and ethnic Macedonian nationalists.
They cited Dörk et al. for having found a marker on Chromosome 7 that is common to Black Africans and, among Caucasoid populations, is found only in Greeks. Dörk et al. did find an African-type of cystic fibrosis mutation in Greeks, however this mutation was extremely rare; it was detected only in three Greek families. The explanation they offered is quite different from Arnaiz-Villena's. Dörk et al. state: "Historical contacts-for example, under Alexander the Great or during the ancient Minoan civilization-may provide an explanation for the common ancestry of disease mutations in these ethnically diverse populations."
Hajjej et al. claimed to have confirmed the genetic relatedness between Greeks and Sub-Saharans. However they used the same methodology (same gene markers) and same data samples like Arnaiz-Villena et al.
Other authors contradict Arnaiz-Villena's results. In The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, 1994), Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi and Piazza grouped Greeks with other European and Mediterranean populations based on 120 loci
(view MDS plot). Then, Ayub et al. 2003 did the same thing using 182 loci (view dendrogram). Another study was conducted in 2004 at Skopje's University of Ss. Kiril and Metodij, using high-resolution typing of HLA-DRB1 according to Arnaiz-Villena's methodology. Contrary to Arnaiz-Villena's conclusion, no sub-Saharan admixture was detected in the Greek sample.
In a sample of 125 Greeks from Thessaloniki
and Sarakatsani
, 2 Asian-specific mtDNA sequences (M and D) were detected (1.6%). No sub-Saharan African genes were observed in this population, therefore, non-Caucasoid maternal ancestry in Greece is very low, as elsewhere in Europe. Additionally, in a sample of 366 Greeks from thirteen locations in continental Greece, Crete, Lesvos and Chios, a single African haplogroup A Y Chromosome was found (0.3%). This marks the only instance to date of sub-Saharan DNA being discovered in Greece. In another sample of 42 Greeks, one sequence of the Siberian Tat-C haplogroup turned up, while other studies with larger sample populations have failed to detect this paternal marker in the Greek gene pool and that its frequencies are actually much higher in Scandinavian and Slavic populations. Also, a paper has detected clades of haplogroups J and E3b that were likely not part of pre-historic migrations into Europe, but rather spread by later historical movements. Greeks possess none of the lineages denoting North African ancestry within the last 5000 years and have only 2% (3/148) of the marker J-M267, which may reflect more recent Middle Eastern admixture.
Jobling et al., in their genetics textbook "Human Evolutionary Genetics: Origins, Peoples & Disease", state that Arnaiz-Villena’s conclusions on the Sub-Saharan origin of Greeks, is an example of arbitrary interpretation and that the methodology used is not appropriate for this kind of research. Karatzios C. et al., made a systematic review of genetics and historical documents, showing great flaws in Arnaiz-Villena’s methodology and theory on the Greeks/Sub-Saharan genetic relationship.
Three respected geneticists, Luca Cavalli-Sforza
, Alberto Piazza and Neil Risch
, criticised Arnaiz-Villena's methodology
. They stated that "Using results from the analysis of a single marker, particularly one likely to have undergone selection, for the purpose of reconstructing genealogies
is unreliable and unacceptable practice in population genetics
. The limitations are made evident by the authors’ extraordinary observations that Greeks are very similar to Ethiopians and east Africans but very distant from other south Europeans; and that the Japanese are nearly identical to west and south Africans. It is surprising that the authors were not puzzled by these anomalous results, which contradict history, geography, anthropology and all prior population-genetic studies of these groups." Arnaiz-Villena et al. countered this criticism in a response, stating "single-locus studies, whether using HLA or other markers, are common in this field and are regularly published in the specialist literature".
to decipher many of the ancient languages of the Mediterranean and Middle East which are known to be unrelated to Basque, including Egyptian
, Hittite
, Sumerian
, Hurrian
, Ugaritic
, Akkadian/Babylonian
, Elamite
, and Phoenician, all of which they claim have been misidentified and mistranslated by the world's linguists and epigraphers for a century. They characterize mainstream research as "science fiction stories". Arnaiz-Villena's Egyptian translations, for example, include the cartouche
of the bilingual Rosseta Stone in which Champollion
identified the name of Ptolemy; in Arnaiz-Villena's interpretation it does not include that name, so that it is actually Arnaiz-Villena who deserves credit for deciphering the hieroglyphs. Similarly, in Arnaiz-Villena's interpretation the Code of Hammurabi
contains "no hint of laws" but is a Basque funerary text, and his purported Basque material proper includes the Iruña-Veleia graffiti, which had been identified as modern forgeries by a multidisciplinary team half a year before his decipherment was published. They also claim to be able to read poorly attested languages such as Etruscan
, Iberian
, Tartessian
, Guanche
, and Minoan, which no-one else has been able to decipher with any certainty. They posit that these are all part of a "Usko-Mediterranean" branch of the speculative Dené–Caucasian language family, which they extend to include the Berber languages
of North Africa. This thesis flatly contradicts basic Egyptological, Sumerian, Semitic, Indo-European, and Mesoamerican scholarship. Phoenician, Akkadian/Babylonian, Ugaritic, and Eblaite
, for example, are transparently Semitic languages, and Arnaiz-Villena excludes the rest of the Semitic languages from his family; Egyptian and Berber along with Semitic have been demonstrated to be Afro-Asiatic
, and generations of linguists have been unable to find a connection between Berber and Basque or Afro-Asiatic and Basque; and Hittite is widely acclaimed as a key in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European
, which Arnaiz-Villena acknowledges is completely unrelated to Basque.
De Hoz
says their work "lacks the slightest value and is contrary not just to the scientific method but to common sense", and "is an unmitigated disaster which in principle should not be reviewed", but that he does so because it was published using public funds by the respected Editorial Complutense
, which might give it undeserved credibility. He calls this a "crime" against legitimate research which has gone unpublished for lack of funds. Pichler likewise describes the "decipherment" of the Canary Island inscriptions as "comic", pointing out that Arnaiz-Villena "translated" an inscription of the alphabet as if it formed words (starting with "fire deceased earth prayer" in Basque), and also found it amazing that the university would publish his books. The "Basque" words he translated into are themselves dubious, including some that are modern neologisms and some that are loanwords from Romance languages, such as bake (from Latin pace "peace"), and which therefore can say nothing about ancient Basque connections. Lakarra, taking as a sample the list of 32 items entitled "Lenguaje religioso-funerario de los pueblos mediterráneos", provided by Arnaiz-Villena and Alonso as evidence for their decipherment, calculates that of the alleged Basque roots proposed by Arnaiz-Villena and Alonso, 85% are faulty or spurious, sometimes "verging on the clumsiest falsification", while even the remaining 15% is unclear.
Arnaiz-Villena denied all charges against him, saying he was the victim of a "public lynching", suggesting that the charges may have a political motivation connected with the Human Immunology scandal. Both the hospital and the university stated that the charges had nothing to do with the Human Immunology affair. Arnaiz-Villena said he was prepared to "go to Strasbourg
" to prove his innocence. Though suspended from the hospital, he continued his work at the University.
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
immunologist
Immunology
Immunology is a broad branch of biomedical science that covers the study of all aspects of the immune system in all organisms. It deals with the physiological functioning of the immune system in states of both health and diseases; malfunctions of the immune system in immunological disorders ; the...
noted for his research into the genetic history of ethnic groups and fringe linguistic hypotheses. Arnaiz-Villena was president of Spain's National Society of Immunology from 1991 to 1995. He has written more than 300 papers in immunology and human and bird population genetics. He is Head of the Department of Microbiology I (Immunology) at the Complutense University of Madrid
Complutense University of Madrid
The Complutense University of Madrid is a university in Madrid, and one of the oldest universities in the world. It is located on a sprawling campus that occupies the entirety of the Ciudad Universitaria district of Madrid, with annexes in the district of Somosaguas in the neighboring city of...
and at Hospital 12 de Octubre http://www.madrid.org/cs/Satellite?blobcol=urlordenpdf&blobheader=application%2Fpdf&blobkey=id&blobtable=CM_Orden_BOCM&blobwhere=1142567931852&ssbinary=true, pages 15 and 18.
He has been invited to give lectures in The French Academy of Sciences (College de France) http://www.college-de-france.fr/default/EN/all/col_daus/Journees_Jean_Dausset_8_et___5.htm and The Royal Society (London)http://royalsociety.org/events/human-evolution-satellite-meeting-biographies/
Jews and Palestinians
Arnaiz-Villena's research was internationally reported following the publication of a paper on the genetic history of JewsJews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
and Palestinians, which he co-authored in the journal Human Immunology
Human Immunology
Human Immunology is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Elsevier.The editor is Nicole Suciu-Foca.- Abstracting and indexing :The journal is abstracted/indexed in:* BIOSIS* Chemical Abstracts* Current Contents* EMBASE* Elsevier BIOBASE...
in 2001. http://kinoko.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~duraid/stolen_science/The_Origin_of_Palestinians_and_Their_Genetic_Relatedness_With_Other_Mediterranean_Populations.pdf
This became controversial because of its assertions about the origins of the Palestine-Israeli conflict. Following strong criticism, it was withdrawn from the journal and deleted from the scientific archive. Also, academics who had already received a copy of the journal were urged to "physically remove" the article pages in a move that had no precedent in research publishing. The comments about Arab-Israeli conflicts were described as "extreme political writing", which included claims that Palestinians in Syria and Lebanon lived in "concentration camps". Arnaiz-Villena was removed from the journal's editorial board.
The decision was met with opposition from several academics. Andrew Goffey, a Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University
Middlesex University
Middlesex University is a university in north London, England. It is located in the historic county boundaries of Middlesex from which it takes its name. It is one of the post-1992 universities and is a member of Million+ working group...
, England, observing that "it was conceded that the article had not been removed on the basis of its scientific evidence," failed to find anything offensive in the paper. Several scientists wrote to the publishers to support Arnaiz-Villena and to protest their heavy-handedness. One of them said: "If Arnaiz-Villena had found evidence that Jewish people were genetically very special, instead of ordinary, you can be sure no one would have objected to the phrases he used in his article. This is a very sad business."
Greeks and Sub-Saharans
Arnaiz-Villena et al. published five scientific articles, where, among other claims, they concluded that the Greek population originates from Sub-Saharan Africa and do not cluster with other Mediterraneans. The explanation they offered is that a large number of Sub-Saharans had migrated to Greece (but not to Crete) during ancient times. Those conclusions were related to the "Black AthenaBlack Athena
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization is a highly controversial three-volume work by Martin Bernal. He discusses Ancient Greece in a new light. Bernal's thesis discusses the perception of ancient Greece in relation to Greece's African and Asiatic neighbors, which he...
" debate and became embroiled in disputes between Greek and ethnic Macedonian nationalists.
They cited Dörk et al. for having found a marker on Chromosome 7 that is common to Black Africans and, among Caucasoid populations, is found only in Greeks. Dörk et al. did find an African-type of cystic fibrosis mutation in Greeks, however this mutation was extremely rare; it was detected only in three Greek families. The explanation they offered is quite different from Arnaiz-Villena's. Dörk et al. state: "Historical contacts-for example, under Alexander the Great or during the ancient Minoan civilization-may provide an explanation for the common ancestry of disease mutations in these ethnically diverse populations."
Hajjej et al. claimed to have confirmed the genetic relatedness between Greeks and Sub-Saharans. However they used the same methodology (same gene markers) and same data samples like Arnaiz-Villena et al.
Other authors contradict Arnaiz-Villena's results. In The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, 1994), Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi and Piazza grouped Greeks with other European and Mediterranean populations based on 120 loci
Locus (genetics)
In the fields of genetics and genetic computation, a locus is the specific location of a gene or DNA sequence on a chromosome. A variant of the DNA sequence at a given locus is called an allele. The ordered list of loci known for a particular genome is called a genetic map...
(view MDS plot). Then, Ayub et al. 2003 did the same thing using 182 loci (view dendrogram). Another study was conducted in 2004 at Skopje's University of Ss. Kiril and Metodij, using high-resolution typing of HLA-DRB1 according to Arnaiz-Villena's methodology. Contrary to Arnaiz-Villena's conclusion, no sub-Saharan admixture was detected in the Greek sample.
In a sample of 125 Greeks from Thessaloniki
Thessaloniki
Thessaloniki , historically also known as Thessalonica, Salonika or Salonica, is the second-largest city in Greece and the capital of the region of Central Macedonia as well as the capital of the Decentralized Administration of Macedonia and Thrace...
and Sarakatsani
Sarakatsani
The Sarakatsani are a group of Greek transhumant shepherds inhabiting chiefly Greece, with a smaller presence in neighbouring Bulgaria, southern Albania and the Republic of Macedonia. Historically centered around the Pindus mountains, they have been currently urbanised to a significant degree...
, 2 Asian-specific mtDNA sequences (M and D) were detected (1.6%). No sub-Saharan African genes were observed in this population, therefore, non-Caucasoid maternal ancestry in Greece is very low, as elsewhere in Europe. Additionally, in a sample of 366 Greeks from thirteen locations in continental Greece, Crete, Lesvos and Chios, a single African haplogroup A Y Chromosome was found (0.3%). This marks the only instance to date of sub-Saharan DNA being discovered in Greece. In another sample of 42 Greeks, one sequence of the Siberian Tat-C haplogroup turned up, while other studies with larger sample populations have failed to detect this paternal marker in the Greek gene pool and that its frequencies are actually much higher in Scandinavian and Slavic populations. Also, a paper has detected clades of haplogroups J and E3b that were likely not part of pre-historic migrations into Europe, but rather spread by later historical movements. Greeks possess none of the lineages denoting North African ancestry within the last 5000 years and have only 2% (3/148) of the marker J-M267, which may reflect more recent Middle Eastern admixture.
Jobling et al., in their genetics textbook "Human Evolutionary Genetics: Origins, Peoples & Disease", state that Arnaiz-Villena’s conclusions on the Sub-Saharan origin of Greeks, is an example of arbitrary interpretation and that the methodology used is not appropriate for this kind of research. Karatzios C. et al., made a systematic review of genetics and historical documents, showing great flaws in Arnaiz-Villena’s methodology and theory on the Greeks/Sub-Saharan genetic relationship.
Three respected geneticists, Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza is an Italian population geneticist born in Genoa, who has been a professor at Stanford University since 1970 .-Books:...
, Alberto Piazza and Neil Risch
Neil Risch
Neil Risch is an American human geneticist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco . Risch is the Lamond Family Foundation Distinguished Professor in Human Genetics and Director of the Institute for Human Genetics and Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF.Known...
, criticised Arnaiz-Villena's methodology
Methodology
Methodology is generally a guideline for solving a problem, with specificcomponents such as phases, tasks, methods, techniques and tools . It can be defined also as follows:...
. They stated that "Using results from the analysis of a single marker, particularly one likely to have undergone selection, for the purpose of reconstructing genealogies
Genealogy
Genealogy is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral traditions, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members...
is unreliable and unacceptable practice in population genetics
Population genetics
Population genetics is the study of allele frequency distribution and change under the influence of the four main evolutionary processes: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow. It also takes into account the factors of recombination, population subdivision and population...
. The limitations are made evident by the authors’ extraordinary observations that Greeks are very similar to Ethiopians and east Africans but very distant from other south Europeans; and that the Japanese are nearly identical to west and south Africans. It is surprising that the authors were not puzzled by these anomalous results, which contradict history, geography, anthropology and all prior population-genetic studies of these groups." Arnaiz-Villena et al. countered this criticism in a response, stating "single-locus studies, whether using HLA or other markers, are common in this field and are regularly published in the specialist literature".
Meso-Americans
Arnaiz-Villena also co-authored a paper on the origins of Mesoamerican populations, which made claims concerning multi-ethnic origins of pre-Columbian populations in the area. The paper argued that the peopling of the Americas "was probably more complex than postulated by Greenberg and others (three peopling waves)", but noted that "Meso and South American Amerindians tend to remain isolated in the Neighbor-Joining, correspondence and plane genetic distance analyses."Ethnic Macedonians
Arnaiz-Villena et al. published two scientific articles, where, among other claims, they concluded that ethnic Macedonians are closely related to Mediterraneans, showing the closest genetic relatedness with Cretan Greeks but not with other Greeks.Fringe linguistic theories
Arnaiz-Villena and Jorge Alonso-Garcia claim to have used BasqueBasque language
Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...
to decipher many of the ancient languages of the Mediterranean and Middle East which are known to be unrelated to Basque, including Egyptian
Egyptian language
Egyptian is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the...
, Hittite
Hittite language
Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
, Sumerian
Sumerian language
Sumerian is the language of ancient Sumer, which was spoken in southern Mesopotamia since at least the 4th millennium BC. During the 3rd millennium BC, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism...
, Hurrian
Hurrian language
Hurrian is a conventional name for the language of the Hurrians , a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and had mostly vanished by 1000 BC. Hurrian was the language of the Mitanni kingdom in northern Mesopotamia, and was likely spoken at least initially in Hurrian settlements in...
, Ugaritic
Ugaritic language
The following table shows Proto-Semitic phonemes and their correspondences among Ugaritic, Arabic and Tiberian Hebrew:-Grammar:Ugaritic is an inflected language, and as a Semitic language its grammatical features are highly similar to those found in Classical Arabic and Akkadian...
, Akkadian/Babylonian
Akkadian language
Akkadian is an extinct Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated language isolate...
, Elamite
Elamite language
Elamite is an extinct language spoken by the ancient Elamites. Elamite was the primary language in present day Iran from 2800–550 BCE. The last written records in Elamite appear about the time of the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great....
, and Phoenician, all of which they claim have been misidentified and mistranslated by the world's linguists and epigraphers for a century. They characterize mainstream research as "science fiction stories". Arnaiz-Villena's Egyptian translations, for example, include the cartouche
Cartouche
In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a cartouche is an ellipse with a horizontal line at one end, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name, coming into use during the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty under Pharaoh Sneferu, replacing the earlier serekh...
of the bilingual Rosseta Stone in which Champollion
Jean-François Champollion
Jean-François Champollion was a French classical scholar, philologist and orientalist, decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphs....
identified the name of Ptolemy; in Arnaiz-Villena's interpretation it does not include that name, so that it is actually Arnaiz-Villena who deserves credit for deciphering the hieroglyphs. Similarly, in Arnaiz-Villena's interpretation the Code of Hammurabi
Code of Hammurabi
The Code of Hammurabi is a well-preserved Babylonian law code, dating to ca. 1780 BC . It is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world. The sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, enacted the code, and partial copies exist on a human-sized stone stele and various clay...
contains "no hint of laws" but is a Basque funerary text, and his purported Basque material proper includes the Iruña-Veleia graffiti, which had been identified as modern forgeries by a multidisciplinary team half a year before his decipherment was published. They also claim to be able to read poorly attested languages such as Etruscan
Etruscan language
The Etruscan language was spoken and written by the Etruscan civilization, in what is present-day Italy, in the ancient region of Etruria and in parts of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna...
, Iberian
Iberian language
The Iberian language was the language of a people identified by Greek and Roman sources who lived in the eastern and southeastern regions of the Iberian peninsula. The ancient Iberians can be identified as a rather nebulous local culture between the 7th and 1st century BC...
, Tartessian
Tartessian language
The Tartessian language is the extinct Paleohispanic language of inscriptions in the Southwestern script found in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula: mainly in the south of Portugal , but also in Spain . There are 95 of these inscriptions with the longest having 82 readable signs...
, Guanche
Guanche language
Guanche is an extinct language that was spoken by the Guanches of the Canary Islands until the 16th or 17th century. It is only known today through a few sentences and individual words recorded by early travellers, supplemented by several placenames, as well as some words assimilated into the...
, and Minoan, which no-one else has been able to decipher with any certainty. They posit that these are all part of a "Usko-Mediterranean" branch of the speculative Dené–Caucasian language family, which they extend to include the Berber languages
Berber languages
The Berber languages are a family of languages indigenous to North Africa, spoken from Siwa Oasis in Egypt to Morocco , and south to the countries of the Sahara Desert...
of North Africa. This thesis flatly contradicts basic Egyptological, Sumerian, Semitic, Indo-European, and Mesoamerican scholarship. Phoenician, Akkadian/Babylonian, Ugaritic, and Eblaite
Eblaite language
Eblaite is an extinct Semitic language, which was spoken in the 3rd millennium BC in the ancient city of Ebla, at Tell Mardikh , between Aleppo and Hama, in western modern Syria....
, for example, are transparently Semitic languages, and Arnaiz-Villena excludes the rest of the Semitic languages from his family; Egyptian and Berber along with Semitic have been demonstrated to be Afro-Asiatic
Afro-Asiatic languages
The Afroasiatic languages , also known as Hamito-Semitic, constitute one of the world's largest language families, with about 375 living languages...
, and generations of linguists have been unable to find a connection between Berber and Basque or Afro-Asiatic and Basque; and Hittite is widely acclaimed as a key in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
, which Arnaiz-Villena acknowledges is completely unrelated to Basque.
De Hoz
Javier de Hoz
Jesús Javier de Hoz Bravo is philologist and Catedrático . Born in Madrid on . Doctor of Philology by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1966...
says their work "lacks the slightest value and is contrary not just to the scientific method but to common sense", and "is an unmitigated disaster which in principle should not be reviewed", but that he does so because it was published using public funds by the respected Editorial Complutense
Editorial Complutense
Editorial Complutense S.A. is a university publisher for Complutense University of Madrid, Spain.The managing director is Cristina Peña-Marín Beristain.- External links :* * , 11-05-2006* , Virginia Collera, 27 May 2006* , eInforma...
, which might give it undeserved credibility. He calls this a "crime" against legitimate research which has gone unpublished for lack of funds. Pichler likewise describes the "decipherment" of the Canary Island inscriptions as "comic", pointing out that Arnaiz-Villena "translated" an inscription of the alphabet as if it formed words (starting with "fire deceased earth prayer" in Basque), and also found it amazing that the university would publish his books. The "Basque" words he translated into are themselves dubious, including some that are modern neologisms and some that are loanwords from Romance languages, such as bake (from Latin pace "peace"), and which therefore can say nothing about ancient Basque connections. Lakarra, taking as a sample the list of 32 items entitled "Lenguaje religioso-funerario de los pueblos mediterráneos", provided by Arnaiz-Villena and Alonso as evidence for their decipherment, calculates that of the alleged Basque roots proposed by Arnaiz-Villena and Alonso, 85% are faulty or spurious, sometimes "verging on the clumsiest falsification", while even the remaining 15% is unclear.
Suspension and litigation
In 2002, Arnaiz-Villena was suspended without pay from the Hospital Doce de Octubre after being charged with embezzlement of funds thought to exceed EUR 300,000. An audit of the section that Arnaiz directed found accounting irregularities of at least EUR 861,000. Arnaiz-Villena was also accused of the "purchase of products not used in his department's health care activities; purchase of hospital products used in health care activities but in quantities much greater than needed; falsification of statistical data apparently to justify purchases; humiliating treatment of department staff; delay in health care activities; and transfer of department products to the university." In March 2003, judges canceled his suspension, ruling it violated the presumption of innocence, and permitting him to return to his post. However, in November 2003 the Court of Administrative Litigation No. 8 of Madrid confirmed the non-criminal charges and sentenced him to 33 months of suspension from work without pay. It did not consider the charge of embezzlement, which was still pending.Arnaiz-Villena denied all charges against him, saying he was the victim of a "public lynching", suggesting that the charges may have a political motivation connected with the Human Immunology scandal. Both the hospital and the university stated that the charges had nothing to do with the Human Immunology affair. Arnaiz-Villena said he was prepared to "go to Strasbourg
European Court of Human Rights
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is a supra-national court established by the European Convention on Human Rights and hears complaints that a contracting state has violated the human rights enshrined in the Convention and its protocols. Complaints can be brought by individuals or...
" to prove his innocence. Though suspended from the hospital, he continued his work at the University.